~ Musings on history, public history, and historic Fredericksburg

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I have done some speaking on the Civil War Round Table circuit lately. The public reaction to all these things has gotten me thinking, and I offer up a few observations.

A couple years ago I made a short circuit through the Deep South, speaking at two Civil War Round Tables. They treated me exceedingly well, and I enjoyed myself. But (you knew that was coming) the experience made an impression on me for other reasons. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, conferences and invitations to speak at Civil War Roundtables were rampant. I think one year, before Return to Bull Run came out, I received something like 180 invitations to speak at various places. And wherever I or one of the others who commonly rode the cannonball circuit went, the audiences were large and sometimes (though not always) enthusiastic . (At one appearance I made before the Northern New Jersey CWRT, 31 of 33 people in the room fell asleep during my talk, a record I surely can never approach again. I still give thanks to the two priests in the front row who managed to stay conscious throughout.)

My latest foray into the deep south took me to two large Southern cities, both with long and deep traditions at it relates to Civil War Round Tables. At one, we had 31 people in the room when I spoke. At the other, 38. Sixty-nine people from metropolitain areas with combined populations approaching 3,000,000. Average age; probably well over 60. One kid, and few young people. Last month I spoke at another CWRT in a LARGE city. Twenty-five people.

We have long been aware of the flagging interest in CWRTs, but I confess this was a bit of a splash to me (I was told the audience for my talks were typical). Friends and colleagues confirm similar experiences across the country. While some CWRT’s continue to thrive, Clearly, the Civil War Round Table as we have known it–once the foundation for interest in and advocacy for Civil War history–is stumbling, suffering from lack of interest. Is it because interest in the Civil War is flagging across the board? At some sites (including ours hereabouts) attendance has dropped 30-40% since 1995 or so, though in recent years the numbers have stabilized, and indeed the last couple have risen. Or is the Civil War Round Table format just not the medium people use to engage their interest in the war? Or, as some have suggested to me, has the move to broaden interpretation of the Civil War–to address more than the traditional military story–turned off the traditionalists, the very people who are often most engaged with CWRTs?

Last weekend, I had the true honor of giving the keynote address at a naturalization ceremony at Chatham. I had never been to a naturalization ceremony before. Thirty-six people became citizens, and probably 150 came to watch.

I have been involved in thousands of public programs in my career, but this ranked in the top five, easily. Witnessing something that truly matters is always a powerful thing, and this mattered–to the people receiving their citizenship, and, truly, to the people looking on as well. The day included none of the strained, polite applause that characterizes graduations or award ceremonies. Instead, there was unadulterated joy–from the participants and those watching.

The invitation to speak prompted some thinking about the nexus between history, citizenship, and our ongoing pursuit of a better nation. Here is what I had to say.

From the first days of our nation, Americans have challenged America to be better. It’s a noisy process, sometimes raucous, sometimes even ungraceful. But the result is unmistakable: from its beginning, our nation has traveled an arc of change that has led us away from oppression and toward equality and justice. We have meandered to be sure, and sometimes we have taken steps backward. But the general arc of change is undeniable: by the efforts of every generation we have progressed, become a better nation–more just, more tolerant.

Citizenship is an invitation to join in that process of change—to join the chorus of Americans challenging America to be better. We challenge ourselves in a million ways, by acts and words. A gesture on a street corner challenges others to be as kind. Putting our children on the school bus each morning challenges us to be as conscientious. We challenge America to improve by voting or volunteering or raking your neighbor’s leaves, by teaching tolerance and confronting intolerance.

Joining this process of national improvement is perhaps the greatest of all the privileges of being an American citizen.

As we sit here today, I ask you to think for a moment about the path to citizenship. Continue reading →

Our friend Pat Sullivan, who maintains the excellent blog “Spotsylvania Memory,” has done a wonderful post on the unendingly interesting details of Phenie Tapp’s life. Phenie holds a prominent place in the history of the park–in the 1930s she narrated to park historian Ralph Happel her memories of the Battle of the Wilderness (she was four or five at the time). But mystery has surrounded her life, which, as Pat shows, turned out to be a whirlwind of drama, betrayal, and intrigue. As Pat’s work demonstrates, not all our local legends were the stuff of virtue.

[From John Hennessy, with great thanks to Kerri Barile of Dovetail Cultural Resources Group for the dig photos. Bear in mind that in this instance, I am just the reporter. ALL the hard work here was done by the Dovetail archaeologists.]

This week archaeologists are working in advance of the continued development of parkland between Sophia Street and the Rappahannock. As we have written before, Sophia Street below the Chatham Bridge has always been an eclectic, sometimes homely, mix of workplace and homeplace, with much change taking place over the decades. Still, its basic function as Fredericksburg’s all-purpose neighborhood remained intact for more than two centuries, until the demand for parking for downtown visitors prompted the transformation of riverside Sophia. Steadily, residences have been removed or transformed. Nowadays, hardly anyone lives on this part of Sophia.

Many believed that the constant change along Sophia Street likely destroyed much evidence of the robust community that once thrived along the street. This week’s archaeological work, done by Dovetail Cultural Resources Group, has shown otherwise. The work has uncovered the foundations of four major antebellum buildings, one of them new to us.

This is a famous picture, taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1927. The buildings shown here stood just south of Shiloh Baptist Church (old site).

The work this week has revealed the building’s foundations vividly.

Behind these buildings at what was 719 Sophia Street stood a large community ice house, built about 1832 and in use until the early 20th century. The ice house shows up clearly in the great 1863 panorama of Fredericksburg. It’s the low-roofed building next to the African Baptist Church.

The dovetail folks found the west foundation of the building–closest to Sophia Street. The ice house pit (to the left in this image) is filled with beautiful clean soil.

They also uncovered the foundation of a house we had never noticed before, though it’s visible in the great 1863 panorama. This was a house that stood behind Absalom Rowe’s main residence. While I did not get a photo of the foundation while it was exposed (the crew was able to take a quick look only before the trench was filled in), it was something of a revelation that the foundation remained. The adjacent ground was built up considerably when the adjacent Masonic Lodge was built in 1921, and no one had much hope that the antebellum foundations would remain. But they do. The building in question is the one immediately beyond Ab Rowe’s outhouse in the foreground.

The archaeological work on Sophia Street will continue through tomorrow, Saturday. Stop by if you have the chance.

Last night I spoke on the experience of Fredericksburg’s civilians at St. George’s Episcopal Church, a historic and beautiful setting largely filled. I ended with a bit of a commentary on public history and the war.

At Fredericksburg, sacrifice, sadness, hurt, destruction, and death came in a fashion and in forms not seen before, affecting soldier and civilian alike, challenging the will of all.

Many of you, perhaps, see the Civil War in a singular way. A war for Union. Or a War for Freedom. A war for independence. Resistance against aggression. An effort to end oppression. An effort to sustain oppression.

Take your pick. You are all right.

Some of you see historical Yankees as vandals…invaders…

You’d all be right again…. They sometimes were.

But they were also ultimately agents of freedom….saviors of the Union of the United States.

Southern soldiers and civilians were noble defenders of homes—courageous, devoted, beset by hardships.

Many also owned slaves, and they waged war for a government committed to sustaining slavery. They waged war in an attempt to dismantle the American Union.

Some of you–with good reason–see the arrival of the Union army opposite Fredericksburg in 1862 as the darkest day in Fredericksburg’s history.

The slave John Washington saw it as the greatest day of his life.

Fact is, our history, our story tonight is all these things. And that’s okay. We needn’t succumb to our mania for defining people and events in a singular way, as good, bad, evil, or noble. To do that requires us to assert the primacy of one story, one perspective over another. To do that requires us to pretend history isn’t complicated.

History is seen and understood differently by different people.

That fact doesn’t diminish our history—it enriches it.

Instead, I ask you to step back and look at these events, this place, as part of a great tide of history—a tide of many swirls and eddies, crosscurrents, and a good deal of flotsam—broken, discarded, ugly things we might wish were not there.

But ultimately it is a tide that leads to our very doors.

It teaches us and inspires us—the price paid, errors made, devotion demonstrated, and triumphs gained on our path to this place at this time as we continue to strive to shape this great nation.

If you haven’t read Pat Sullivan’s blog Spotsylvania Memory, you should. He views regional history through the eyes of his family’s long presence on this land. He’s a great writer possessed of fabulous source material, with a terrific balance of hard-bitten history and sentimentality. I promote this for no reason other than it’s REALLY good. http://spotsylvaniamemory.blogspot.com

[A note: I’ll be sharing occasional musings, curiosities, and discoveries about my research on Twitter henceforth–@JohnHennessy2]

Memorial Day in Fredericksburg is always special. This is a community touched deeply by war, and the quest to accord meaning and understanding to the loss is an annual rite, often intensely felt.

The day began, as it does every year, at the Confederate Cemetery at the head of Amelia Street. Compared to the NPS effort in the National Cemetery, this ceremony is almost always more colorful and musical, and often more compelling. Today Bill Freehling spoke about the six Confederate generals buried in the cemetery.

The ceremony at the Confederate Cemetery is managed by the Ladies Memorial Association of Fredericksburg, one of only two LMAs remaining in Fredericksburg. The continuity of the Fredericksburg LMA’s efforts over the decades is one thing that makes this ceremony so powerful each year. It is the definition of tradition and a heartfelt expression to the spirit of those who served and fell under the Confederate flag.

While most years the ceremony in the Confederate Cemetery is the better ticket, this year the ceremony in the National Cemetery got more attention. This year, the 23d USCT (re-constituted) resurrected the long-ago tradition of members of the African-American community leading the Memorial Day services in the cemetery. We have discussed the end of those services here.

The 23d USCT, with a considerable throng of citizens trailing behind, marched through the streets of Fredericksburg to the cemetery, where they were joined by members of the 13th Virginia and 3d U.S. Infantry.

Rev. Lawrence Davies (former mayor and pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church Old Site) offered up thoughtful, direct, and hopeful address on the importance of the traditional connection of the African-American community to the practice of honoring the dead in the Fredericksburg cemetery. More than that, he offered up the idea that the effort was vitally important today, as an expression of reconciliation–not between sections, but between, as he called it, “factions” within the community.

Today was, indeed, the first time that we know that any sort of organized groups representing the African American Community, the former Confederacy, and the U.S. Army came together to observe Memorial Day in Fredericksburg.

I hear constant rumblings that some think this a bad thing or a bad idea. I daresay no one who was there today could thoughtfully label it such. The audience in attendance–about 350–was the largest the ceremony has seen in many, many years.

It was a good day for history in Fredericksburg.

The procession from the church to the cemetery was joined by a few self-styled “Flaggers,” each bearing a Confederate flag. They were respectful and genial every step, as was, I think, the audience toward them.

A passing shot: here is Captain James Keith Boswell’s grave at the Confederate Cemetery this morning. He fell in the volley that mortally wounded Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville.

It certainly counts as one of the three or four strangest experiences of my life–the 45 seconds of confusion and even fear that accompanied the earthquake the other day. Many have rejoiced in being able to have checked something off their bucket list, and I confess I would be enthused about that too, except for the real damage the quake did. Indeed, the toll seems to be highest on historic buildings. In Culpeper, several buildings in the downtown were condemned. We had no such dramatics in Fredericksburg, but chimneys by the dozen tumbled, and not a few places had cracks and other bothersome problems.

You can find photos of the damage to the Fredericksburg Area Museum, in the old town hall, here. And here too is video from Fredericksburglive.com of damage to the historic town hall and the building across the street, and the treatment undertaken on both.

The discovery last week of bullets imbedded in a tree at Gettysburg reminded me of a transient mystery from my Manassas days. Out in the area of Groveton woods–a couple hundreds yards east of where Porter staged for his August 30 attack–there stood a decrepit barn that once had been part of the farm of Montgomery Peters, a postwar resident on the battlefield. Like its owner, the barn was postwar too–we knew that–and so there was little urgency to halt its deterioration (the attitude would not be as dismissive today), which by the time I encountered it was decades old. Finally, the place just had to come down, and the park’s maintenance staff went at it.

Some of the timbers were ancient and huge, and when they cut into at least one of them, they found it contained several Civil War bullets. But…the barn wasn’t there during the war? A scramble to the source material confirmed that that was undeniably true. After some puzzling, we soon realized that the timbers had probably been cut from the adjacent woods, which had been the scene of heavy combat….

And that’s how bullets from the battle ended up in a barn that wasn’t there….

Here is Stonewall Jackson at the Centennial Re-enactment of First Manassas,, 1961, a topic we will explore in future posts.

My apologies for being distracted from blogging lately–some heavy business at the park and vacations have intervened to rob of almost all thinking and writing time. It was indeed my intent to slow the pace of posts on here, but certainly not to the extent you have suffered of late.

As many of you know, I have written a great deal about Manassas over the years. There was a time when I was completely Manassas-ed out, and had little desire to read, speak, or see another word about Manassas. But, I have recovered from all that, and lately have been doing a lot of reflection on what I did and did not to do as it relates to the Civil War landscape around Manassas. One of the things that strikes me is the degree to which, in two books on the battles, I almost completely ignored the civilian landscape upon which the battles took place–hardly delving deeper than identifying property owners, with a few details added here and there. Lately I have been doing some prep work for a tour I’ll be doing at Manassas as part of the 150th–a walk through the former community of Sudley. And so I have re-engaged a bit on things Manassas, and I have enjoyed it a good deal. Not surprisingly, there are as a result a few things I’d like to write about related to Manassas. Rather than start another blog, I have decided simply to expand the scope of this one a bit to range northward from Fredericksburg occasionally.

I do this without any desire to intrude on the bloggish turf staked out by Harry Smeltzer over at Bull Runnings, a site I enjoy and respect very much (and recommend to you highly). Harry’s work is largely focused on compiling sources related to the battle; mine will be to occasionally look at issues of landscape, some mysteries, and maybe a few conundrums as they relate to Manassas. We will not be leaving Fredericksburg behind…but will be simply broadening the scope of the blog a bit. I’ll have a few Manassas-related items in the coming weeks, as well as a look at “Sit-in Corner” in Fredericksburg, and more.

I will concede that the business of blogging is a bit consumptive and exhaustive. For me, this expansion of the scope is a bit of a boost with respect to interest and energy. I hope Noel, who has considerable expertise in things related to Northern Virginia, will join in on the discussion as well–as he has so often on things Fredericksburg related. Onward.